One Fierce Beer Coaster

One Fierce Beer Coaster

Article excerpt

You'd think alternative rock would naturally deal with alternative lifestyles. Complaints about the once-vital genre's stagnancy have grown louder, and the pressure mounts for would-be rad rockers to prove themselves as something other than cash-hungry. As a result we queers have found ourselves the subject matter of several tunes coined by straight dudes who are desperate to whine about something a little more imaginative than suburban ennui.

Weezer, the MTV wonder of a few seasons back, isn't doing too well these days. This is not for lack of trying: The title of its sophomore flop, Pinkerton, refers to the central character in Madama Butterfly. Puccini's classic opera apparently is the album's central influence. And the opera's theme of hopeless love certainly pops up in the song "Pink Triangle." The singer falls in love with an aloof woman who wears a pink triangle on her sleeve. "If everyone's a little queer," songwriter Rivers Cuomo reasons, "can't she be a little straight?"

Less rational and more annoying is Bloodhound Gang, the latest group of skanky buds with backward baseball caps and a musical sensibility to match. Their wanna-be status is confirmed by the song "I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks." It's a tune that both envies nancy boys (straight girls love 'em) and stereotypes them (we all have names like Dirk or Lewis, wear women's lingerie, appreciate British synth-rockers Depeche Mode, and shave our heinies). Even if some of those things are true some of the time (especially the Depeche Mode part), it's irritating to have them pointed out to us by some guy who is by his own admission too ugly to be, you know, one of us. …